


two fish

by nokomisfics



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Happy Ending, M/M, Phan - Freeform, Phan Angst, Phan Fluff, Wow Spoiler Much, but also sad, its so funny tbh, this is probably the most obscure fic ive ever written
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-26
Updated: 2015-07-26
Packaged: 2018-04-11 08:39:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4428749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nokomisfics/pseuds/nokomisfics
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>dan is in depression and phil is a goldfish.</p>
            </blockquote>





	two fish

**Author's Note:**

  * For [deadguysinbowties on tumblr](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=deadguysinbowties+on+tumblr).



> hi! so this was the pinch-hit fic i wrote for phandom big bang '15. as u may have noticed, dan is in depression in this fic. if you are triggered by sad thoughts, this fic is probably not for you. please take care of yourself first and talk to someone when the sadness gets too much. secondly, anything mentioned towards the end of this fic is not absolute. i have never experienced clinical depression and therefore cannot say for sure what can cure it, if it can be cured at all. <3
> 
> [on a lighter note, i would like to thank [kate](http://hopelesslyhowell.tumblr.com) for the beta, and also jonathan for reminding me of my obligations and being a goofball at the right time.]

“Oh! You elbows are rough as fuck, Christ.”

Dan looks up, bleary eyed, and Brenda beside him is rubbing her arm with a scowl on her face. He stares down at his elbows, and it’s obvious that the skin there is cracking, dry. Dan glances back at Brenda and shrugs.

“Don’t you have, like, cream or something? You should really start moisturizing.”

Dan shrugs again. He considers telling her that he doesn’t have any cream. In his mind he says you know what Brenda, the cream got over sometime last year. I squeezed at it and all that came out was a desolate white puff, so I cut open the bottle and scraped out the remaining of the cream. Then the bottle was truly empty. I sat down and stared at the bottle, Brenda, because I’d run out of cream and I didn’t want to go out and buy some. Because I was tootired. D’you know what that feels like, Brenda? To be too tired to buy more cream that I could keep my elbows fucking moisturized?

Dan says none of this, though. He shrugs, rests his forehead on his arms and slows his breathing down deliberately, just as the professor walks in, so that when she calls for him he can just pretend to be asleep and fucking Brenda won’t bother enough to tell the difference.

After this one, he promises himself, he’ll walk home. His mum told him she’ll only let him stay with her if he got out of the house for at least a few hours a day. Sessions with his therapist don’t count, apparently. So he would go out – with her, in the beginning – for a cup of tea and a croissant at the corner coffee shop. Then she enrolled him in university after a while, which he supposed he should’ve seen coming. So now he attends one lecture, two if he loses count and forgot about the previous one, but never more than that.

(He needs his Mum around because she makes sure he doesn’t go days simply forgetting to brush his teeth, like he would in his flat, and he doesn’t give a fuck about what Brenda says about twenty-two-year-old men living with their mums. Brenda doesn’t know shit.)

At home Dan stays under the covers, bundled up but still cold. He feels feverish in here, but it’s better than the alternative of wandering out at the call for lunch and seeing the pictures along the staircase of his younger self, smiling in stupid t-shirts at playgrounds and birthday parties. In hindsight it probably wasn’t a good idea to move back into a house that held memories of a happier version of him, but at this point he’s just too tired to care.

His mum comes in at eleven with soup, bless her, and goes out again for a wet towel when she sees he’s sweating. He has the soup because he’s rather not watch her face fall like it did last night when he pushed away the braised duck. He allows her to dab at his forehead with the towel. Then she goes out again and doesn’t come back for the rest of the night.

Dan buries his head in the pillows and breathes hard – sleeping the entire day has made him an insomniac at night, and forcing himself to sleep now would just give him nightmares. He plugs in his earphones but doesn’t turn on any music, and the next morning he’s convinced he’s mastered the art of falling asleep with his eyes open.

Dan first heard the term “emo” when he was twelve and began wearing black clothes. They were just t-shirts at first, although he would soon branch out into skinny black jeans as well, and someone faceless and nameless had screamed it at him from the other side of the classroom. Dan’s an emo, the bloke had said, with such conviction that Dan himself believed it. Was glad, actually. Glad that he’d been given a spot on the hierarchy of middle school, no matter how far removed and desolate it was. He didn’t notice how people began avoiding him until he was fifteen, which was well after the apathy set in.

Dan didn’t look up the proper symptoms for depression until the second week of his first year at his first attempt at university. He’d bought three cartons of milk the previous week and had kept them on the counter of his little kitchen. Then he’d forgotten about them and left them to go bad, spent the entire of the next week in bed and missed all of his classes. When someone at the uni called him up to check on him, he’d listened to their concerned voice asking him if he was alright and hung up immediately.

After he looked up the symptoms for depression, Dan called up his mum and told her quietly that he was very, very sad all the time and didn’t know what to do about it. It took her a while to react because it was four in the morning. (Dan wasn’t sleepy in the slightest.) They went to a therapist the next day and after Dan was professionally diagnosed with clinical depression, nothing changed in the slightest.

His mother buys him a goldfish.

In the second year of Dan’s second attempt at university, he wanders out of his room one day long enough to have a conversation with his mum about animals. Goldfish are nice, he says, before returning back to his room.

So on Dan’s birthday that year his mum gets him a goldfish.

“To keep you company,” she says, coming in at night and setting the little glass bowl on Dan’s desk. Dan raises his head long enough to stare at her, and at the little blob of gold swimming around in the glass bowl, and allows himself to care enough to think what the actual fuck before letting his head fall back onto the pillows.

His mum comes to his side, places a gentle kiss on his forehead and says, “Happy birthday, baby.” Dan thinks about the days when he was small enough to be properly called her baby, and wonders if this apathetic, unaccomplished person is what she’d wanted him to grow into. It’s too late to regret any of that now, whatever the case, so he nods and says thanks and then she goes out and leaves him alone.

With the fucking goldfish.

He gives it a proper look the next morning. Gets out of bed, approaches his desk and presses his nose to the glass, going cross-eyed staring at the goldfish. The tiny creature, which had been swimming ‘round in stupid little circles all this time, now comes to stop directly in front of his nose. It bobs there for a moment. Then it flicks its tail and resumes swimming round the bowl again.

Dan drags in a slow breath. Then he pulls away from the bowl and looks about. There’s a pack of fish food behind the bowl, so he tears open the packet and gives it a sniff. Nice. He empties a pinch of the colourful balls of fish food into the palm of his hand, and then sort of dumps it into the bowl.

The fish immediately swims itself into a frenzy, determined to wallop every last ball in record timing, which is does. Dan frowns down at it, vaguely impressed. Then, for the first time in very, very long, his stomach rumbles. So he leaves the fish food by the bowl and trudges out to the kitchen to find himself some food.

In the evening he hears his mum come home and immediately shuts off the light in his room and gets under the covers. He’d spent the last two hours sitting in front of the fish bowl and staring at the fish, until his eyes had glazed over and his leg had begun twitching. Now, he stretches out in his bed and wills himself to sleep. But he’s instead distracted by an extra pair of footsteps, and then he thinks, shit.

Adrian.

“Dan?” comes the timely voice of his baby brother, except he doesn’t sound that baby-ish anymore, and Dan hasn’t spoken to him in years. He’ll go away if I don’t make a sound, Dan figures, so he rolls over in bed and wills himself to breathe a little more quietly.

“Dan?” calls Adrian again, and then there’s the sound of the door knob twisting. Dan bites his bottom lip and his leg twitches again. He doesn’t hate his brother. He just. He just wants him to go now, is all.

In the bowl, the fish splashes about.

The door swings open and Adrian walks in. Dan doesn’t see him because his eyes are screwed shut, but he can hear his breathing and it’s disruptive, loud.

“Go away,” Dan says, but his words are muffled by the blankets he’s got swaddled about him and Adrian probably doesn’t hear him.

“Hey, Dan,” says Adrian, his voice soft now and a little sympathetic. He can probably make out Dan trembling under the covers, must have figured out that he’s still awake. Dan bites into his lip harder. “Just wanted to wish you a happy birthday. Sorry I’m a day late, man, we had orientation yesterday and I couldn’t get the permission to skip it.”

That’s right, remembers Dan. It’s Adrian’s first year of college. Dan tries to imagine his brother in college, around people, loud and dynamic, funny and brilliant. The thought makes Dan want to curl up into a ball and block out all the sounds. Adrian’s got his shit together, and here is Dan suffering from a disease in his head. He doesn’t deserve to be in the same fucking room as his brother.

Salvation comes in the form of his mum’s footsteps, and then her loud voice saying, “Adrian, darling, didn’t I tell you not to come in here?” She sounds tense, on guard. From under his eyelids Dan can picture her tugging gently at Adrian’s arm, attempting to lead him out of the room. “The two of you can chat tomorrow, alright? Catch up and all of that. Leave him be now, honey.”

“In a bit,” Adrian says finally, and Dan has to bite back a yell. There are footsteps again although Dan can’t be bothered this time to listen hard enough to make sense of it. Then Adrian says (to him, he presumes), “There’s a goldfish on your desk.”

No shit, Dan thinks.

“That’s nice,” comments Adrian absently. Dan wonders if he’s sitting at his desk, trailing a hand against the glass bowl like Dan had been doing earlier. Dan wonders if the fish is following his brother’s finger like it had followed his. ‘Course it is, Dan concludes. Traitor.

“Have you named it yet?” asks Adrian. Dan has to fight back the urge to sit up and yell at him properly to leave him alone, so instead he focuses on Adrian’s question. Has he named the fish yet? No, he bloody well hasn’t. Was he supposed to? He doesn’t fucking know. Maybe the fish is offended. Maybe that’s why it’s following Adrian’s fucking finger now, instead of Dan’s, like it’s supposed to.

Adrian leaves not long after. When the door shuts behind him, Dan counts to ten very very slowly before pushing the covers back. The room is empty. Gratefully, he sits up and tells his heart to calm the fuck down. He stares at the fishbowl and the goldfish stops swimming around for a moment and stares back.

“D’you want a name?” asks Dan, then cringes because now he’s just gone and spoken to a bloody fish. That’s going on the list of things he isn’t mentioning to his therapist the next time he meets her.

The fish stares at him for a beat longer, like it’s slowly coming to terms with the fact that not only is Dan a depressed piece of shit but he is, in fact, a stupiddepressed piece of shit. Then the fish swims a lap of the fishbowl, coming to rest and staring back at Dan again.

Christ, Dan thinks. The fish is communicating back.

“Fine,” he says. “How’s Roger?”

The fish doesn’t move.

“Clint?”

Not a twitch.

“What, are you a girl, then? How’s Philippa?”

The fish bobs there and Dan’s about to suggest another stupid fucking fish name when it begins to swim about. Normally, like the matter’s settled. Dan keeps his eyes on the fish for a while, until they glaze over again and his body thrums with fatigue. Then he falls back into bed and, for the first time in a while, finds sleep immediately.

In the fishbowl, Philippa the goldfish splashes about.

Feeding the fish becomes Dan’s self-appointed job. Every morning he empties a bit of the little colourful balls into the bowl, and then he ventures out to find himself some breakfast. One Sunday, Dan complains loudly about them having run out of cereal. His mum admonishes him for not going out and getting some himself, but all the while she smiles. Dan realises then that she hadn’t known he’d begun eating of his own accord again, and something thick and heavy bunches up in his chest.

He begins talking to the fish, too, but only in private. “Philippa,” he says some mornings. “I don’t feel like going to uni today.” He talks to it (her?) from the bed, and Philippa stops swimming about to look at him. Admonishingly, it seems. So Dan gets dressed and heads out because he doesn’t want to disappoint his fucking fish.

Dan remembers vaguely that goldfish are thought to have a memory span of only three seconds, and then subsequently concludes that Philippa can’t possibly be a goldfish. Because she still appears to be pissed with him for forgetting to feed her that one morning two weeks ago.

He walks down to the park once, on a whim, and brings Philippa the fish with him. He knows he must look like a loon, sitting cross-legged by the pond with a fishbowl for company, but he doesn’t know anyone in this town anyway. Not anymore. He isn’t as saddened by that thought as he used to be.

“You know, Philippa,” he says out loud when he’s sure there isn’t anyone around. “You’re my friend. I consider you my friend. Is that alright with you?”

Philippa continues to swim about in her bowl, not a care in her little fish world.

“Yeah, thought so,” says Dan in turn. And then he laughs. It’s a tiny chuckle but it feels odd coming out from between his lips, because Dan hasn’t laughed in… he hasn’t laughed in long. He looks down at the stupid fish in its stupid bowl, and then sometimes comes over him and he says, “Do you want to die, Philippa?”

He leans down, presses his nose to the fishbowl like he’d done all those months ago. “Because I don’t want to die,” he whispers. “And I’ve never not wanted to die. It’s a bit scary, if I’m honest.” Philippa stops moving then, stays completely still in front of him. For the first time Dan notices that Philippa’s eyes are a shocking blue. And she’s looking right at him, he knows she is.

“But I can live with that,” he adds.

Two and a half years after Dan is diagnosed with clinical depression, things change.

Dan moves out. He gets an apartment not too far from his Mum’s place and just behind the park. He gets a job in the town library sorting out old books and checking in new ones. Six days a week, and the pay is good. Brenda gave him a hug on the last day of uni and he hasn’t heard from her since, and he’s kind of grateful for that. Adrian visits regularly. He has a key to Dan’s flat and Dan’s gotten used to coming back from the library to his baby brother asleep on his couch.

He feels more like a baby brother now, and Dan’s grateful for that, too.

And Philippa?

Three years after Philippa the fish entered his life, Dan wakes up one day to an empty fishbowl.

His heart races. He’d been preparing himself for it, sure. A typical goldfish can live in domestic care for up to seven months, by now Philippa’s death had been long overdue.

Dan’s heart races anyway. So does his mind - where is Philippa’s body? Did Adrian come home late last night, see the fish floating upside down in the bowl, and taken it away before Dan could wake up and see the sad demise of his friend for himself? It doesn’t seem likely, because the bowl’s still there.

Dan tells himself sternly not to panic. If Philippa the fish is gone, she’s gone. There’s nothing he can do about it now. Carefully, he pushes the covers on his bed back and climbs out of it. He runs a hand through his hair and paces his breathing. Then he hears sounds coming from the kitchen, the chink of glass, and his theory about Adrian seems a little more plausible.

He trudges into the kitchen in his green Shrek slippers saying, “Adrian, why didn’t - “ and then he stops dead in his tracks because there’s a man in his kitchen preparing tea. And it isn’t Adrian.

What the fuck, he begins to say, but then the man turns around and he has Dan’s Adventure Time cup in his hands and he walks right into Dan. And the tea is -

“Fucking hot, ow! Ow, shit shit shit shit - “ Dan’s hopping about trying to shake the beverage off his body (like that’d work) and then there are two hands on his chest trying to wipe away the tea, too, and the man’s saying, “Sorry, oh my god Dan I’m so sorry, I’m - “

Dan stops hopping about and instead yells, “Who the fuck are you?”

The man steps away immediately, withdrawing his hands. When he looks up at Dan he has the bluest pair of eyes Dan has ever seen. You could go swimming in them. Dan watches as the man chews on his bottom lip and wonders what he’s to do if the man pulls out a gun and shoots him in the chest. I don’t want to die, he thinks. It’s a thought he has often as of late.

“I’m, um.” The man stops, looks away. His hair is ginger and his skin is ridiculously pale. He’s skinny and tall and vaguely attractive. “God, this is awkward.” The man laughs.

Dan’s still not over his blue eyes. They kind of remind him of… of Philippa.

That must be the stupidest thought Dan’s ever had, all the suicidal ones included.

“Who are you?” Dan asks again, his voice harsh. He should be mourning the death of his friend right now, not dealing with a fucking criminal. “It’s not a difficult question, just fucking answer it.”

The man flinches visibly at his tone of voice. “I don’t know how to explain,” he says helplessly. Then fucking try, Dan’s about to say, until the man continues. “I’m not a stranger. You’ve known me for a while.”

“Okay?” says Dan slowly. “Except that’s a lie, because I’ve never known you. I’m depressed, not amnesiac.”

“Dan…” The man wrings his hands together, like what he’s about to say is going to take a lot of courage. Dan’s chest still stings from the burns of the tea and he wishes the man would just spit it out. “I’m, uh. You probably won’t remember me because, like. I’ve lived most of my life in your fish bowl. Y’know?”

There’s a pause. A long, stretched out pause, as Dan makes the absurdest connection he’s ever, ever made. And then -

“Philippa?”

He insists on being called Phil and apologises over and over again about the tea. Dan wants to yell at him to stop apologising except it’s rather a cute affair, the way Phil takes a wet rag and rubs at Dan’s stained t-shirt and then complains about burns and asks Dan where he keeps his ice packs.

“How does it work?” Dan asks, once Phil has calmed down enough to perch cautiously on the couch beside Dan. He figures he can call the library today and ask for the day off. It seems apt.

“I don’t know.” Phil shrugs, and even that seems cute to Dan. “I just know that I was your fish until last night, and I woke up on your bed this morning as a human.”

“Wait, you woke up on my bed?”

“Yeah.” Phil chuckles awkwardly. “I’m sorry? I was also naked, so I borrowed some of your clothes. Hope that’s, um. Okay.”

Dan had noticed that Phil was wearing his grey hoodie and trackies previously, but he grins now. It’s somehow reassuring that Phil hadn’t hesitated to wear Dan’s clothes, make himself some (hot) tea in Dan’s kitchen. Dan had always considered Philippa the fish a friend, and it was nice to know now that nothing had to change.

“But why now?” Dan asks, and only once he’s said it does he realise that he’s been wondering it for a while. “Why didn’t you… Why didn’t you become human a long time ago, when I was still. Bad. I used to - used to tell you when I felt like offing myself, you know? Those would have been. Appropriate moments.”

Phil shrugs again, a little frown on his face. “I don’t really understand it,” he says, his voice dropping to a softer volume. “Maybe it’s because me trying to save you - me in human form, that is - maybe it would’ve complicated things. Maybe you’re supposed to… help yourself, first.”

Dan feels a small twitch where his heart is supposed to be. He slumps back into the couch, comforted by Phil’s words, and beside him Phil presses himself carefully to Dan’s side. Dan is grateful for it, the body heat and familiarity. He feels as close to Phil the man as he did to Philippa the fish, and the absurdity of it has begun to fade. He’d always known Philipps couldn’t have possibly been a normal goldfish.

“Are you better now, Dan?” Phil asks softly somewhere above Dan’s head. And Dan doesn’t have to think too much about it before nodding.

After a beat of silence Phil says, a laugh lacing his voice, “I’m still sorry about the tea, though.”

Dan likes how it feels, the sturdiness of Phil’s chest and how his arms come to rest around Dan, enclosing him just a little in a bubble of warmth. Phil the man has the bluest eyes Dan has ever seen, but they are soft and friendly. He has high cheekbones and a cheeky smile, and Dan thinks he’d like to press a kiss into the crook of his neck if he gets the chance. Maybe he’ll even hit him with a pillow for apologising about the tea so bloody much.

That’ll all come later, though. Dan just wants to stay here for a moment.

They say that’s not how depression works. They say you don’t just meet a person and fall in love and get better. They say no matter how kind people are to you, how lovely and sincere and caring, the depression sometimes doesn’t go away. It can’t.

They don’t tell you the other half of it, though. They don’t tell you that it gets better. It can, if you believe hard enough. If you help yourself and allow people who care to help you too. The depression doesn’t go away but your resistance to it builds up, until ‘depressed’ stops being a prefix to your name. Until it becomes, like it really is, a disease in your head. And you, you become a person again. A person capable of loving and being loved, of feeling all the crazy things that everybody feels in all the crazy ways that everybody feels them.

A person capable of, even for the most fleeting of moments, being happy.

**Author's Note:**

> writers are inherently vain creatures. boost my ego, leave a review! [really though, tell me what you thought of my fic and i'll be eternally grateful]
> 
> find me on tumblr at [oopsiwritefanficdonttellmum](http://oopsiwritefanficdonttellmum.tumblr.com) :D


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